"Those weren't twist-off!"
"I have strong hands."
Well, she'd known a couple of guys in the service who liked to prove their macho cred by doing that kind of thing. With Dane, though, it didn't seem like showing off so much as a casual matter of practicality.
Mira sat cross-legged on the sun-warmed rocks, and Dane sat beside her. "You don't have to tell me anything too personal," she said. "But I really do need a good reason before I'm going to crawl into a cave at the first sign of someone coming around the island. Surely a whale-watching boat or something like that isn't a threat. What are you afraid of—or should I say, who?"
Dane was quiet for a moment, sipping his beer. "There's a lot about it I don't think I can explain," he said at last, gruffly. "It's not that I don't want to. It's that I don't know how. I promise I'll try to figure out how to tell you everything. But what you need to know for now is that I—escaped from some bad people, and they might come after me."
His gaze had dropped to the ground. Before she could second-guess herself, Mira laid a hand on his arm. She felt him lean instinctively into her touch.
"Prison?" she asked quietly. She couldn't say why this didn't concern her; she only knew that she couldn't imagine Dane, with his gentle hands and quiet manner, genuinely hurting someone. If he had escaped from prison, he must have been wrongly accused.
"No," he said quickly. "No, nothing like that. It was—a mistake," he went on in a low voice, looking at his hands. "I volunteered for what I thought was a special project in the service. An elite unit. What it turned out to be was a mercenary unit, and once I was in, I couldn't get out. I had to escape."
Mira realized that her mouth had fallen open. It sounded as fantastic as the thriller fiction she used to devour during slow times on the boat. But there was no denying the heaviness of pain and loss in Dane's voice.
"And you're afraid they'll come after you? Is that why you're living on this island?"
Dane nodded without speaking. After a moment, he said, "If a tourist boat comes around, it's fine for you to talk to them. But I don't want anyone to know I'm here."
The absolute isolation of his existence was starting to sink in, to her sympathetic horror. "Can't you ever talk to anyone?"
Dane managed a faint smile. "My buddy Eren, who comes out with his boat, and his girlfriend. That's it." He turned abruptly, startling her, to meet her eyes with his green ones. "And you."
The earnest sincerity on his face took her breath away. No wonder he had seemed to gravitate to her like a flower toward the sun, if he wasthatalone here. But as soon as the thought came to her, it felt unworthy. She didn't think his interest in her was just because she was the first unattached woman to arrive on his island. It was a lot more than that. There was a uniqueness to whatever it was that had started to grow between them. She had a strong feeling that he wouldn't have told anyone else what he had just told her.
His face was so close to hers. She still had her hand on his arm and was all too aware of the warmth of his skin through the light fabric of his shirt. His lips seemed suddenly, infinitely near to hers. All she had to do was lean forward and brush them with her own.
What froze her was a bone-deep fear of hurting him. She was starting to realize that Dane didn't open up to people often, or, perhaps, ever. This might be the first time that he had ever talked about this part of his life to anyone.
Mira was no virgin. She'd lived a life. She'd had boyfriends and even picked up guys in bars.
But this felt tentative and fragile andimportantin a way she was unprepared for. There might as well be a voice in the back of her head telling her not to mess this up.
Instead she ended up sitting there staring into his eyes with her hand on his arm and a growing sense that she was behaving like an idiot.
To her complete surprise, he was the one who leaned forward and kissed her.
It was just the faintest brush of his lips on hers, a bare taste of the heated, passionate lock of mouths that she had been imagining, in some part of her mind, ever since she met him. It was like having a buffet in front of her and being given a mere taste. But it was an incredibly alluring taste.
"Thank you for listening," he said quietly, and smiled.
The beauty of this smile took her breath away. She felt, in that instant, as if she had never truly seen him smile before now. His brief smiles were always lovely, but this—filled with a sincere and heartfelt gratitude—was transcendentally beautiful. She could have all too easily lost herself in it.
She still might.
DANE
The utter reliefof being able to talk to Mira about his past was almost overwhelming. Dane had nothing but instinct to reassure him that she wasn't going to betray him, but it was so strong that he couldn't deny it. He knew down to his core that she would never misuse anything that he told her.
Now if he could just figure out a way to tell her about the orca situation.
For now, he felt that he'd had about as much heart-to-heart as he could take. He could still taste her lips, warm and full under his. The heat in her eyes said clearly that she would have enjoyed more, but Dane was more than willing to take it as slow as she wanted. He could only handle the intensity of her in small doses. He was a starving man having to reintroduce himself to a bounty.
Mira, it seemed, was entirely fine with not rushing into things. He couldn't wait to lay her down on the bed and unwrap her like a gift delivered to his shore, but he wanted to do it right. He wasn't going to rush it, and he wasn't going to risk allowing his own recent isolation to spoil it. He had to court her like the beautiful, precious creature that she was.
Andthenhe was going to ravish her tenderly and passionately until both of them saw stars.
